Kelvin Hopkins: I remain to be convinced that the Government are serious about dealing with tax avoidance and evasion. We have a revenue problem, not an expenditure problem. We are failing to collect taxes, and what are the Government doing? Successive Governments have cut the number of staff at HMRC. We should be increasing their number, because every additional tax collector collects many times their own salary. We should increase staffing levels at HMRC and start to collect those taxes. That would make a real difference.
	The superficial analogy with personal household incomes has been drawn time and again—“You can’t spend what you don’t earn” and all that. If a person’s or family’s expenditure is greater than their income, we get the mea culpa effect, because people finish up in penury, but Governments and economies are not like that. One person’s spending becomes another person’s income, and so on, and we get this circular flow of income, which generates jobs, wealth and tax revenues. Economies do not work like family incomes, as Keynes explained many times in very simple terms. I used to try and explain it to my students as well. Economies are not like households, so I hope that we can dismiss this simplistic analogy with personal incomes.
	We have to invest, to start building again and to reflate the economy. We will do that by driving up employment in labour intensive areas, and the most labour intensive sectors are those such as construction and public services. We get much more bang for our buck from investing in those areas than from cutting taxes. The money saved by doing the latter leaks away to the better-off and frequently into tax havens, which brings no benefit to the economy, whereas direct spending on building more houses, for example, has beneficial and rapid effects on the economy. The other great advantage of construction and public services is that they have a low import content, which means that we do not get leakages in imports—not in the first round at least. It is a very sensible way of trying to regenerate the economy.
	We also need the right parity for our currency. Successive Governments have been obsessed with keeping the pound “strong”, as they call it—in other words, overvalued—which means that we become uncompetitive. The strongest evidence that we are uncompetitive is our a £1 billion-a-week deficit with the rest of the EU. We should use our advantage in having our own currency to find an appropriate—in other words, lower—parity for sterling, so that we can regain our competitive advantage.
	There is much more I wish to say, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I fear I have had my time. Thank you.